La Lutte avec l’ange

Malraux’s only major text on the Resistance, La Lutte avec l’ange was first published in New York in late 1942, ahead of an American pre-original edition, before some extracts appeared in January 1943 in Geneva in La Semaine littéraire.

Scholars long believed that Malraux had left no text on the Resistance, unlike the works he had devoted to the Spanish Civil War or anticolonialism (L’Espoir in 1937 and Les Conquérants in 1928). Yet he was indeed a résistant, and although fiction blends with reality — his own name within the Alsace-Lorraine brigade, Colonel Berger, borrows from Vincent Berger, the character of La Lutte avec l’Ange — he wrote an admirable, unfinished text, leaving one to wonder about the two further parts that were meant to follow it. A few pages of these are known, those devoted to Lawrence of Arabia, published in an offprint of 80 copies in 1946 under the title N’était-ce donc que cela?

It was during his stay in the Alpes-Maritimes, where he had taken refuge after his escape (he had been a prisoner since August 1940, at Sens), that Malraux completed the text, which he immediately sent to be printed in Switzerland, imposing a distinctive printing feature on Maurice Blanc, the Lausanne publisher of Éditions du Haut-Pays: the central part of the novel (entitled Les Noyers de l’Altenburg) is printed in black, while the prologue and epilogue are printed in bistre italics. These two sections relate the memories of a narrator on the French side, who recounts the adventures of his father, a secret agent for Germany and later a German officer. Twenty-five years later, in the Antimémoires, Malraux returned to La Lutte avec l’ange, emphasizing the biographical, and partly autobiographical, character of this last novel. It was published in France by Éditions Gallimard in 1948, under the sole title Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, with a previously unpublished “note” by the author.

La Lutte avec l’ange had an exceptionally limited print run: 1,436 copies on vergé bouffant paper made up the regular issue, preceded only by 20 copies on vergé chiffon, 5 on Auvergne paper and 5 on Hollande paper — one of which was reserved for the author.

A magnificent deluxe copy, superbly bound by Pierre-Lucien Martin.

From the libraries of Marcel de Merre (Sotheby’s, 2007, no. 379) and Bernard Loliée (Sotheby’s, 2014, no. 143).